Nikhil Chakravartty, who now heads the Prasar Bharati Board as its first chairman, is one of those few who never seem to grow old. He is one whom neither time seems to corrode nor age seem to whither. Even at 84 today, he is as brisk of body as agile of mind as he was at 60 when I first came to know him.

If anything, he has become a lot more prolific than he was in those days. Although I have not been in personal touch with him for nearly a decade now. I see him all over the pages of our dailies. It seems as if no newspaper in India today can do without an article from him. Who would hesitate to say that if the term doyen fits any journalist now, it is him.

This, despite the fact that recognition as a mainstream journalist came to Nikhil rather late in life. It was only when he was already past his 60s that he first came to be hailed as a warrior journalist by journalists outside the narrow circle of Nehruite Leftists.

Worse still for him, even within this narrow circle of Marxist persuasion, he remained somewhat of a suspect because of his contrarian views on contemporary events as, for instance, on the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956.This was despite the fact that he had been a member of then united communist party ever since his days at the Merton College, Oxford, in the early 40s.

Nikhil went to Oxford in 1943 to study history after securing a first class masters degree in the subject from the Presidency College, Calcutta. He came into conflict with his teachers at Oxford when he called the mutiny of 1857 a war of independence

While still in England, like many of his contemporaries, he first became a Laskite socialist and then a communist before returning home to Calcutta to work as a journalist for the Peoples Age, the communist party weekly. When he moved to Delhi in 1957 on his wife being elected to the Lok Sabha, he was enrolled in a group entrusted with the task of drafting central committee resolutions for the party.

Then, he launched a postal news and features agency-The Indian Press Agency in 1957 and five years later came his weekly journal of comment, opinion and ideas which he named Mainstream, now edited by his son Sumit Chakravartty.

Nikhil had named his weekly Mainstream and made every effort to really make it one, inviting journalists, intellectuals and politicians of different shades of opinion to contribute to it. However, during those days of partisan journalism it was not easy for an editor of Marxist persuasion, let alone a communist party member, to convince those on the other side of the ideological fence that he held views independent of the party line.

The press in those days was divided between what my then editor, Edatata Narayanan, of Patriot, contemptuously called the “Jute Press” and Frank Moraes of the Indian Express, described as the “Coffee Percolator Press” with equal contempt. Such was the time when Nikhil launched the Mainstream to chalk out a middle path. Already considered ideologically suspect by the Leftists, he now came to be suspected by the Rightists too, though many from the Rightists camp did contribute to his journal because of its reach among intellectuals of both hues. Mainstream earned a reputation for Nikhil as an editor of contrary views but no recognition among the Rightists as an independent journalist.

The turning point came in 1975 when he emerged as a warrior journalist against Indira Gandhi’s Emergency. His staunch opposition of the emergency alienated him from Leftists like Narayanan, Aruna Asaf Ali, Vishwanath and others but he won new friends like Inder Kumar Gujral, BG Verghese and Rajni Kothari. Nikhil’s Mainstream editorials like “Springchiken” which lambasted the wily ways in which Indira Gandhi was popping her son, Sanjay Gandhi, as her political heir and “Do we need Nehru today”, which contrasted Nehru’s democratic ways with the totalitarian practices of Indira Gandhi, were hailed by all as acts of extreme courage. It was Nikhil’s battle against emergency, which earned him the respect of what one might today call mainstream journalists. He remains today a journalist’s journalist. What is amazing is despite having written so many opinion pieces, he still feels fit enough to remain associated with the numerous educational institutions and media organisations. I do not know how demanding the Prasar Bharati Board Chairmanship will be, but I am sure Nikhil has fire enough in him for the job.